A former marketing professor of mine once compared SEO to the stock market. When someone invests in the stock market, they expect their money to “work for them”, and not have to do much in the future to make a profit. The same goes for SEO: if you invest time and effort into making SEO a priority while building and adding to your website, you should see a return on investment later.
Now, keep in mind: sometimes those changes we make to improve our website’s SEO ranking can take up to six months to pay off! That does not mean you should be discouraged or not bother to implement best SEO practices; it simply means do not be discouraged when the changes you made on a Friday haven’t led to any changes in your website traffic by the following Monday.
You may have to wait a bit for return on investment, but you shouldn’t have to invest a ton of time into making some changers. Here’s a few quick ways to give your website a boost in the SEO rankings:
1. Keywords and key phrases
Keywords are one of the main ways the internet reads the content on your site. When you enter keywords or key phrases, the internet is more likely to pull up your web page or blog post for people to use the keyword or key phrase in their search bar. Most keywords are discovered during the keyword research process and are chosen based on a combination of search volume, competition, and commercial intent.
2. Titles and meta descriptions
There are two different titles you want to concern yourself with: SEO titles and page titles (sometimes referred to as title tags). An SEO title is there to make people want to click your webpage in the list of search engine results. It should lure the reader in and prep them for an interesting and informative article ahead.
The page title is what shows on the webpage once someone clicks to read the article. These two titles do NOT have to be identical, but likely will be at least slightly identical since they will pertain to the same content in the web page.
Then, there’s your meta descriptions. Search engines use meta descriptions to learn more about a web page. If the same word or phrase is used in your meta description and you entered it as a keyword or key phrase, search engines will rank your page even higher.
3. Let’s get social
Posting on your association’s social media channels won’t directly impact your SEO, but when you share links to your association’s website on social media, those clicks to the website can certainly help! Directing traffic to your website is a great way to drive your website to the top of the SEO rankings.
Social media can even help convert those who find your association through search platforms like Google. Because social media websites have such a high-ranking authority terms of SEO, your association’s social media page could also rank for specific keywords.
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These SEO tips probably won’t create any long-term, incredible growth when it comes to SEO rankings, but it could be enough to push your page’s ranking from good to great. And remember to refresh your knowledge on SEO periodically – we never know when the algorithm will be changing!